the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604), and the First Folio (F1, 1623).

Rahul Bose as Snehamoy Chatterjee

Raima Sen as Sandhya

Chigasu Takaku as Miyage

Moushmi Chatterjee as Maashi

Rudranil Ghosh as Fatik

http://marina628.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/brian-mchale-postmodernist-fiction/

July 19, 2012. 7.35 a.m.

Next is ontological, which McHale correlates with the postmodern. With ontological, the focus is less on questions about the world which can be answered; instead, the world itself comes into question. Where McHale likened epistemological with detective fiction, he relates the ontological with science fiction. In science fiction, the reliability of the world around you is not a major concern. For a story to take place in a bizarre environment, or to be told by a different sort of narrator, is ok with ontological. Using Fight Club again, the narrator exists in two different worlds. There is his world, however, he also exists in Tyler’s world as well. Mchale presents us with the idea that the “blurring of identities that tends to destabilize the projected world” In Fight Club, the narrator’s identity becomes severely blurred between himself and Tyler. And as a result, his world becomes greatly destabilized. Using Galatea 2.2, we have an instance where the author is also the main character in the text. This brings the fictional world which the character inhabits together with the real world that the author is living in.

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/heidegger.html

July 18, 2012 10.28 pm

Heidegger’s Being and Time

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) is an exploration of the meaning of being as defined by temporality, and is an analysis of time as a horizon for the understanding of being. Heidegger presents his view of philosophy as phenomenological ontology, beginning with the hermeneutics of Da-sein (there-being). Da-sein is a term used by Heidegger to refer to being which understands its own being. Da-sein is conscious being, and is the kind of consciousness which belongs to human beings.

Heidegger argues that Da-sein has both an ontic (existential) and ontological priority over other kinds of being. Da-sein is a kind of being which can understand the existence of beings other than itself. Thus, the ontic and ontological structure of Da-sein is the foundation for every other kind of being.

The being of Da-sein is different from the being of objective presence, in that Da-sein can project its own possibility. The factuality of Da-sein, which includes projected possibility, is different from the factuality of what is objectively present.

Da-sein may be authentic or inauthentic, depending on whether its projected possibility belongs, or does not belong, to itself. Authenticity and inauthenticity are thus modes or conditions of possibility. Da-sein reveals itself by authenticity, and conceals itself by inauthenticity. Authenticity and inauthentity are fundamental existential possibilities or determinations of Da-sein.

The possible determinations of Da-sein or of other kinds of being vary in their ontological character. Heidegger refers to determinations of Da-sein as "existentials," while he refers to determinations of being unlike Da-sein as "categories." Existential determinations are neither "things at hand" nor "things objectively present," but are instead constituents of the being of Da-sein. Categorial determinations, on the other hand, refer to "things at hand" or to "things objectively present."

Heidegger distinguishes between "things at hand" and "things objectively present" as different modes of categorial determination. "Things at hand" are encountered by Da-sein in its concern with, or in its taking care of, the world. Things at hand may be useful or "handy." Things objectively present may also become objects of concern for Da-sein. Things objectively present are important constituents of the actuality or reality of the world. While "handiness" is the being of beings initially encountered by Da-sein, "objective presence" is the being of beings found to be of concern after Da-sein has encountered what is at hand.

According to Heidegger, categorial determinations include: handiness, objective presence, conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, obstinacy, thingliness, and remoteness. Existential determinations include: temporality, spatiality, being-in-the-world, worldliness, nearness, disclosedness, thrownness, attunement, understanding, interpretation, significance, discourse, language, idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, and falling prey.

Da-sein (there-being) is always being-in-the-world. The world includes the totality of "things at hand" and "things objectively present," but is also the realm in which Da-sein has its being. The world is a constitutive factor of Da-sein. The world is a structural component of being-in-the-world.

Da-sein as being-in-the-world has both temporality and spatiality. The spatiality of Da-sein includes de-distancing and directionality. De-distancing is a mode of bringing beings nearer to each other. Da-sein is a mode of being that de-distances being in space. Heidegger argues that Da-sein is a nearness rather than a remoteness. The nearness which is determined by Da-sein has a character of directionality.

Da-sein is disclosed to itself by attunement, by understanding, and by discourse. Attunement is a mode by which the mood and thrown possibility of Da-sein are disclosed

to itself. Understanding is a mode by which the meaning and significance of being-in-the-world are disclosed to Da-sein. Discourse is the mode by which the intelligibility of Da-sein can be communicated.

The "there" of there-being may be disclosed by attunement or by understanding. The "there" of there-being is also the thrownness of its being, in that Da-sein always discovers that it is already in-the-world. Da-sein is attuned to itself when it discovers its own mood, and when it discovers the thrownness of its being.

Da-sein is factical, in that it is thrown being-in-the-world. Da-sein understands its own thrownness by projecting itself as factical potentiality. Facticity or thrownness is the "there" of Da-sein.

Disclosedness may be authentic or inauthentic. Da-sein may be disclosed to itself authentically or inauthentically in relation to its existence and thrown potentiality.

Heidegger declares that truth is the disclosedness of Da-sein. There can be no truth without Da-sein. The full disclosedness of Da-sein is based on its concern with being-in-the-world.

Heidegger describes fear as a mode of attunement, and says that it may be caused by something which is at hand or by something which is objectively present. Fear may become alarm, horror, or terror. Fear concerning the well-being of others may be a mode of attunement to others.

Heidegger also distinguishes between fear and Angst. Fear may be caused by something definite, by something which is at hand, or by something which is objectively present. Angst may be caused by something indefinite, by something which is not at hand, or by something which is not objectively present. Fear may be an apprehension of an innerworldly being, while Angst is not an apprehension of an innerworldly being. Fear may cause flight from something at hand, or from something objectively present, while Angst may cause flight from Da-sein itself.

Da-sein may be disclosed to itself as a projection of itself toward its own potentiality. The freedom of Da-sein to understand its own potentiality may also be the freedom to project itself authentically or inauthentically. Da-sein is free to project, or not to project, itself. Da-sein is free to reveal or conceal itself.

Da-sein reveals itself as care, not only in its being-with things at hand or with things objectively present, but in its being-in-the-world. Thus, being-with things at hand or being-with things objectively present also means being concerned with, or taking care of, them.

Care includes taking care of things at hand, taking care of things objectively present, and taking care of Da-sein itself. According to Heidegger, care brings things nearer to Da-sein.Care is circumspect when it discovers things at hand. Care is heedful when it discovers not only things at hand, but things not at hand.

Da-sein takes care of things, and takes care of other beings. Da-sein takes care of being and time. Da-sein is fundamentally concerned about its mode of being, and thus becomes attuned to projecting its own potentiality.

Being-with-others, having concern for others, and taking care of the world are modes by which Da-sein becomes attuned to being-in-the-world. Thus, the being of Da-sein reveals a care and concern by which Da-sein understands and transcends itself.

Heidegger describes conscience as a call of care, which summons Da-sein to return from falling prey to the world. Falling prey to the world is a form of inauthenticity, in that Da-sein becomes absorbed by being-with-others, being-with things at hand, or being-with things objectively present, to the extent that Da-sein no longer reveals itself. Conscience enables Da-sein to recognize what is lacking in its being, and to redirect itself toward its full potentiality. The call of conscience is to take care of other beings, and of being-in-the-world.

According to Heidegger, resoluteness is the mode by which Da-sein is disclosed to itself as wanting to act according to conscience. Resoluteness is a willingness of Da-sein to project itself into situations in which it may feel guilty for not having taken care of

things, and in which it thus may experience Angst. Resoluteness is a freedom from fear, and is an acceptance of Angst as an existential possibility. Resoluteness is authentic being-in-the-world, in that Da-sein takes care of things, of other beings, and of its own mode of being.

Heidegger describes anticipatory resoluteness as being ahead-of-itself. Anticipation refers to the "not yet," while thrownness refers to the "already projected." Authentic existence is resolute, while inauthentic existence is irresolute.

According to Heidegger, being-toward-death is attunement to no-longer-being-in-the-world. Authentic being-toward-death is attunement to death as an existential possibility. Inauthentic being-toward-death is a lack of attunement to death as an existential possibility. Being-toward-death is Angst insofar as it is an attunement to death as a negation of the individualized being of Da-sein. Angst may arise when Da-sein is faced with the possible annihilation of its existence.

Heidegger explains that Da-sein is a temporal mode of being. Authentic temporality is the being of Da-sein, while inauthentic temporality is the being of innerworldy things or beings unlike Da-sein. Time is a structural factor for Da-sein. Temporality makes possible the historicity of Da-sein, which may be undisclosed or concealed but may be discovered by historical inquiry. The historicity of Da-sein means that ontological inquiry also has its own historicity.

Da-sein understands itself by projecting itself as its thrown possibility. The thrownness of Da-sein is its "having been," and the projected possibility of Da-sein is its "already being" and its "not yet." Thus, Da-sein unifies the past, the present, and the future. The past, present, and future are referred to by Heidegger as the "ecstacies" of temporality. Temporality is "ecstatic," and is the meaning of there-being. Da-sein temporalizes itself in its being-in-the-world. Da-sein reveals the "ecstatic" unity of temporality.

Heidegger concludes that the distinction between Da-sein and other kinds of being is only the beginning of ontology, and that temporality as the meaning of being still needs to be further explained. If temporality is the meaning of being, what is the meaning of temporality? Heidegger does not fully answer this question, but leaves it open to further investigation.

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/what-is-space-time

July 18, 2012. 8.33 p.m.

While the idea of space-time is closely linked with Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, mathematician Hermann Minkowski actually coined the term three years later in 1908 in response to Einstein's theory.

Time is a measurement of change that takes place in what we call space. The series of changes that makes up your life happens over time and in space. The word "space-time" is our merging of the two concepts into a single continuum: three spatial dimensions plus a fourth dimension of time. While we have the ability to control our experience of the first three dimensions (height, width and depth), we do not seem to have the ability to navigate, manipulate or control our experience of time, even though physics tells us that it is merely a dimension like all the others. For human beings, time seems to be a one-way street with a pretty strict speed limit.

Despite our inability to significantly manipulate our experience of time, we can observe the existence and unity of space-time by using experiments. If you've ever swung a bucket of water around in a circle, you know that with sufficient speed you can turn the entire bucket sideways without any of the water coming out. This is due to the equivalence principle, a key concept in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that gravity working in one direction is equivalent to acceleration in the other. That's also why an ascending elevator provides a feeling of increased gravity and a feeling of decreased gravity during descent. The equivalence principle means gravity affects measurements of time and space, warping space-time itself.

The concept of an object of great mass warping space is familiar to us -- a planet or a star warps the topography of an area of space, causing nearby objects to be pulled into the depression it creates. But scientists have also been able to observe with empirical data that objects of great mass can warp time as well. For example, if you synchronize two clocks and take one of them into space (away from Earth's center of gravity), they will lose their synchronization. This proves that time is part of the same continuum as space, and that space-time is a real and useful concept.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.htmlJuly 17, 2012. 9.29 a.m.

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension (“STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine”).

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_humanitas90.htmlJuly 6, 2012 10.16 a.m.

Time–space compression

Time–space compression (also known as space–time convergence) is a term used to describe processes that seem to accelerate the experience of time and reduce the significance of distance during a given historical moment. Geographer David Harvey used the term in The Condition of Postmodernity, where it refers to "processes that ... revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time" (240). Sociologist Anthony Giddens introduced a similar but slightly differentiated term, time–space distantiation.

Time-space compression often refers to technologies that seem to accelerate or elide spatial and temporal distances, including technologies of communication (telegraph, telephones, fax machines, Internet), travel (rail, cars, trains, jets) and economics (the need to overcome spatial barriers, open up new markets, speed up production cycles, and reduce the turn-over time of capital). According to theorists such as Paul Virilio, time-space compression represents an essential facet of contemporary life: "Today we are entering a space which is speed-space ... This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming" (qtd. in Decron 71). Virilio also uses the term dromology to describe "speed-space." The present moment, which some would characterize as postmodern, presents one example of an historical period marked by time-space compression.

Theorists generally identify two historical periods in which time-space compression occurred: the period from the mid-19th century to the beginnings of the First World War, and the end of the twentieth century. In both of these time periods, according to Jon May and Nigel Thrift, “there occurred a radical restructuring in the nature and experience of both time and space ... both periods saw a significant acceleration in the pace of life concomitant with a dissolution or collapse of traditional spatial co-ordinates” (7).

Time-Space Compression

In his book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey makes the argument that postmodernism is in fact a cultural construct of the flexible accumulation of the economy, or what others have called globalization. To make his argument Harvey discusses the phenomena of what he calls "time-space compression." Harvey claims that ever since the increased mobility and internationalization of capital in the early 1970's, society has undergone another round of "time-space compression" which is the likely root of the postmodern condition. What exactly this means and how it relates to the our place/space discussion will hopefully make itself clear in what follows here.

According to Harvey, "the general effect is for capitalist modernization to be very much about speed-up and acceleration in the pace of economic processes and, hence, social life" (Harvey, 230). The goal of this speed-up is to accelerate "the turnover time of capital" which is composed of the "time of production together with the time of

circulation of exchange" (Harvey, 229). In this process, the rapidity of time annihilates the barriers of space. As Harvey puts it, "innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers...have been of immense significance in the history of capitalism, turning that history into a very geographical affair--the railroad and the telegraph, the automobile, radio and telephone, the jet aircraft and television, and the recent telecommunications revolution are cases in point" (Harvey, 232). All these modernizations have served to make the world a smaller place, and have in the last quarter of the twentieth century connected disparate markets together in the creation of a world market with global producers and global consumers. For example, the world from 1500 to 1960 got 70 times smaller as the average speed in 1500 of horse-drawn carriages or boats was 10mph versus planes in 1960 which could fly 700 mph. The Fordist economy, however, with its spatial "rigidities" in which capital was held to be loyal to a place, to a nation, ended up becoming a bottleneck, a spatial barrier to be overcome. Coupled with the advent of new global communications technology, like telephones, satelites, tv, and the fax, it has become increasingly feasible for corporations to become transnational, to transcend spatial bottlenecks like the nation. It was thus the dismantling of the Fordist economy, which became too "rigid" and constraining to capital in the early 1970's with the emergent onset of a flexible regime of accumulation, which marked a "new round" of time space compression.A good example to illustrate the increased time-space compression of the globalizing economy, is the global financial system. "One of the signals of the breakdown of the Fordist-Keynesian system," Harvey notes, "was the breakdown of the convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold [for ever] since 1973, money has been de-materialized in the sense that it no longer has a formal or tangible link to precious metals, or for that matter to any other tangible commodity" (Harvey, 296-297). This dematerialization of money coupled with the shift to a global system of floating exchange rates, has created a global financial system, in which all currency is connected. Thus, a stock market crash as just occurred in East Asia, can have serious repercussions in the Japanese market, and even in the U.S. market. This has served to further undermine national sovereignty, the power of place, and the autonomy of the local, for with the breakdown of national-keynesian policies where the state regulated its exchange rates, nations are now disciplined and vulnerable to the fluctuations of global finance. In the words of William Greider, it's "one world, ready or not!"

This one world, works increasingly faster, leading to the common understanding in Wall Street that 24 hours is a very long time in the world of international finance (Harvey). This is especially true considering that in one second, a bank computer can switch millions of dollars from one national currency to another in response to a slight fluctuation in exchange, and in the process gain millions of dollars out of nothing. This serves as a prime example, and almost the culmination, of the capitalist dream of ever-shortening turnover time. For the production process can be bypassed and spatial barriers skipped altogether via electronic banking systems which profit off of speculation.

But the global financial system, which though ever important in helping to shape the development of our world, is more of an abstracted system which we tend not to associate

with our daily lives. Thus it by itself (which is an oxymoron) does not serve as the stimulus for the rise of the postmodern condition. Harvey, however, does mention other aspects of the global modern world which better correlate. Thanks to the global production and circulation brought about by the globalization of the economy, localities are now accustomed to the influx of images and goods from around the world. TV news gives us in one half-hour, images, coupled with sound bites of processed information, of Palestinians throwing rocks down sun bleached streets in the middle-east, of Hutus and Tutsis swinging axes in the green southern valleys of Africa, of a face of a tupac amaru guerilla in Peru, of a Parisian drinking wine in an outdoor dinery, and of a mid-western town drowned by a flood; while the Disovery channel takes us to the Himalayas on our couch; and grocery stores are filled with "Kenyan haricot beans, Californian celery and avocados, Noth African potatoes, Canadian apples, and Chilean grapes" (Harvey, 300). In under twelve hours we can go from a small town in Ohio to the streets of Nairobi via a plane, a scientist in the Anarctic can e-mail their friend back in Australia, and musicians can blend African drum rhythms with Indian sitars, with slow jazz, backed with a techno beat beating through the night. The world has thus become a virtual grab bag; a world which breeds the pastiche, simulacrum, and juxtapositions which are the predominant mediums of postmodern art.

Furthermore, time space compression which marks the erosion of place into space, creates a disconnection to place and a subsequent "universal placenessless" which creates the feel of the postmodern condition, or what Geoffrey Hartman calls the "release from gravity" (Poe). This "release from gravity" is epitomized in the video clip shown above from Wim Wender's movie Unitil the End of the World. In the video, Claire, rotating gravity-less in a ship floating over the earth which she watches through a computer, talks to her old boyfriend through the TV who is in New York, and who is then joined by other friends of Claire from around the world on a conference call to sing to her, in multiple languages, her birthday. In the annihilation of place, Claire is literally in boundaryless "space." One doesn't have to wonder what Heidegger would think about such a state. For without a boundary to begin "presencing," Heidegger believes there can be no being. Heidegger's view is backed by Celeste Olalquiaga, who claims that when a human, or any organism for that matter, is engulfed in space, a condition of pyschasthenia occurs, in which one's identity is lost. Pyschasthenis occurs when someone is "incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body," and when one in turn becomes "lost in the immense area that circumscribes it" (Olalquiaga, 1). When this occurs, "the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond" (Olalquiaga, 1).

Although the clip from Wender's film serves as a good example of the loss of gravity that can come from the placenessless caused by time-space compression, it is not exactly what you'd call an everyday experience. When Geoffrey Hartman talks of a loss of gravity and when Olalquiaga talks of pyschathenis, they are not talking about astranauts. Rather they are most specifically addressing the spatial phenomema of the megalopolis, which are those "urban sites that are no longer able to maintain a defined form" (Poe). Also known as urban sprawl, this type of development is in an "endless processal flux" (Frampton) as

capital comes to the strip, opens and closes, always leaking further outwards creating a "liquidation of all referentials" in whose absence it can become quite difficult to orientate oneself (Baudrillard).

This megalopolis is a product of time-space compression in that as Paul Ricoeur says, it is a product of the "phenomenon of universalization." According to Ricoeur, this phenomenon "while being an advancement...at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction...[of] the creative nucleus of great cultures, that nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life....This threat is expressed...by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization...Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities..." (Ricoeur). If we view the time space compression of universalization or of globalization as being a blender which steadily mixes more and more different ingredients from around the world into the same mush, then megalopolis are those places of mush, or what we call space, and what James Kunstler calls the "geography of nowhere." In this mush, in this space, in this geography of nowhere, the lack of referentiality to coordinate oneself causes disorientation, identity-loss, and senselessness. For the self, as Olalquiaga states, begins to acquire some of the traits of the surrounding landscapes. Thus if the landscapes are marked by an absence of boundaries, of reference points, while possessing a leaking decentering "endless processal flux," then clear boundaries of one's identity will also become decentered as well. What does this mean? Well, in the movie Repo Man, which took place in the warehouse wastelands of L.A.'s sprawls, the main character, Otto, remarks that "not many people got a code to live by anymore." Such codes, be them moral, intellectual, or cultural, are sure absent in postmodernism which, in its relativistic anti-foundationalism, can't get itself to say whether something is right or something is wrong. In the boundaryless world left by time-space compression, it is indeed hard to draw a boundary oneself, hard to draw a line in the sand.

By not being able to draw a line in the sand postmodernists will by their nature not be able to support Ken Gould's Deweyan call for extra-local mobilization to help strengthen and stabilize the quickly liquidating local community. This is a shame because the balance between local monitoring and global mobilizing (a strategy of place and space tactics) which Ken Gould emphasizes is pragmatic and adheres well, albeit in a political way, with Yi-Fu Tuan's definition of place/space. According to Tuan, "human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom...A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the boundedness of place and the exposure of space" (Space & Place, 54). In postmodernism's unabashed call for freedom--freedom from structure, freedom from hierarchy, freedom from metanarrative, freedom from organization, freedom from ethics, and freedom from politics, in its exciting and inspiring anarchic impulse, it loses the balance between "constraint and freedom," for by not accepting constraint (i.e. rejecting rationality, relativising values, scorning organization) it not only fails to help the local, but in turn fuels the global, helping to expand the mush of megalopolis space which in turn erodes place. For if space represents freedom, then postmodernity's freedom, its foundation-less, rootless, value-less extropy, flows ever so

well with the loose and liquid, rootless, capital which is eroding place all over this globalizing world. By failing to take a stand, to draw a line in the sand, postmodernism thus only adds grease to the global capitalist wheel which is spinning out of control. This is the "trouble" with postmodernism, claims Marshall Bermnan, it "never developed a critical perspective which might have clarified the point where openness to the modern world has got to stop, and the point where the modern artist needs to see and say that some of the powers of this world got to go" (Berman, 32).

It is no wonder therefore, with the popular ideology of our present time so relativistic, so value-less, so non-committed, that the ideology of the free-market is such a catch-all phrase, that wild-boundaryless capitalism goes unquestioned and unchallenged, and hence, why the autonomy of place is being eroded and with it the nation-state and with it democracy. All state intervention, as was prevalent in the post-fordist economy, is now looked upon as too statist, as too controlling, and thus "governments, intimidated by market ideology, are actually pulling back at the very moment they ought to be aggressively intervening. [For] what was once understood as protecting the public interest is now excoriated as heavy-handed regulatory browbeating. [And thus] justice yields to markets, even though, as Felix Rohatyn has bluntly confessed, 'there is a brutal Darwinian logic to these markets'" (Barber, 7). Such a mimetic relationship between free market capitalism, which observes no boundaries, no borders, no customs, no traditions, no regulations, no loyalities, no committments, and postmodernism, leaves one with the chicken and egg question of which came first. Is postmodernism a culture which has adapted itself and formulated itself to the changing landscapes and ideologies of the free market flexible accumulation of wild capitalism? Or is it vice versa? Or is it both?

In appreciating and incorporating the presence of time-space compression into this discussion, with its erosion of all spatial boundaries, I think it is accurate to not say one is the chicken or one is the egg. If the medium is the message here, then it would be safe to say, that postmodernism, globalization, and time-space compression are so interwoven, so de-differentiated that trying to seperate them is like asking a Hindu if he/she's religious. Religion? they'd say in confusion. What's that? For before the west introduced the term, religion was never differentiated from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

However, as both Historical geographers, Edward Soja and David Harvey, point out, the increasing homogenization of the world is reciprocated by increased differentation as well. This works on many levels--in particular on a cultural level, where there is an increase in pluralism, heterogenity, and a hyper-differentation of interests/fetishes/obsessions, and on an economic level where there is still, more then ever, core/periphery, developed/underdeveloped places within the spaces. Harvey continues off of this point saying, "spaces of very different worlds seem to collapse upon each other, much as the world's commodities are assembled in the supermarket and all manner of sub-cultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city. Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in

exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen" (Harvey, 302). Such "disruptive spatiality" is perhaps most visible and volatile in the wake of footloose multinational capital, in its scramble across the globe, as it deposits striking juxtapositions of first world wealth with third world poverty, whether it be South Central by Bell Aire, or the shanty towns of Bogota beyond the razor edged walls of Banker Ave. And just like postmodern art, these juxtapositions do challenge our ontological stability, they do make us question, "what world am I in? which role do I play? Am I in the first world or the third world? Am I the colonizer or the colonized?" And yes, it is hard to find a balance here, to have a foundation in a world where the middle-class stability of the post-war fordist economy has fallen asunder by capital flight and the world is accelerating, restructuring, and shrinking. It's also not hard to have a decentered self in a decentered world, and it isn't hard to imagine why the increased anti-foundationalism of postmodernism is reciprocated by increased fundamentalism which seeks a return to the basics, to tradition, to stability, to order. And in sum, it isn't hard to see the Christian Right and Postmodernity as dialectical responses to similar social/political/economic changes. For, thanks to the increased circulation of globalization, people from Katmandu are in Kansas and people from Kansas are in Katmandu. Worlds are colliding with worlds. Do you respond with pluralism or intolerance? Are you Jihad or McWorld? Are you, you?

David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity

general views and definitions postmodern city The experience of space and time Issues for discussion: What are the possible meanings of spatialization and spatial practices on aesthetic level, political level, social level, as well the level of everyday life? While being encyclopedic and inclusive, does Harvey ignore the personal spatial practices?Is capital so powerful as Harvey analyzes that politics, the local and tradition cannot really resist it (e.g. pp. 238-39; pp. 302-)?To quote Harvey, "if, ... , we have lost the modernist faith in becoming. . . , is there any way out except via the reactionary politics of an aesthetized spatiality? . . . Worse still, if aesthetic production has now been so thoroughly commodified and thereby become really subsumed within a political economy of cultural production, how can we possibly stop that circle closing onto a produced, and hence all too easily manipulated, aestheticization of a globally mediatized politics?" (305) Doesn't he rule out the possibilities of spatial politics since space is dominated by capital, which collapses all boundaries?Harvey's view of the transition from modernity to postmodernity : from Fordist-Keynesian system to more flexible accumulation of capital.

"I broadly accept the view that the long postwar boom, from 1945 to 1973, was built upon a certain set of labour control practices, technological mixes, consumption habits, and configuration of political-economic power, and that this configuration can reasonably be called Fordist-Keynesian. The break up of this system since 1973 has inaugurated a period of rapid change, flux, and uncertainty. Whether or not the new systems of production and marketing, characterized by the more flexible labour processes and markets, of geographical mobility and rapid shifts in consumption practices, warrant the title of a new regime of accumulation, and whether the revival of entrepreneurialism and neo-conservatism, coupled with the cultural turn to postmodernism, warrant the title of a new mode of regulation, is by no means clear." (124)

Fordism-- "Ford believe that the new kind of society could be built simply through the proper application of corporate power. The purpose of the five-dollar, eight-hour day was only in part to secure worker compliance with the discipline required to work the highly productive assembly-line system. It was coincidentally meant to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to consume the mass-produced products the corporations were about to turn out in ever vaster quantities" (126)Flexible accumulation -- "marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and between geographical regions, giving rise, for example, to a vast surge in so-called 'service-sector' employment as well as to entirely new industrial ensembles in hitherto underdeveloped regions . . . Has also also entailed a new round of what I shall call 'time-space compression'. . . in the capitalist world -- the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space" (147).strong features -- absorption of overaccumulation through temporal displacement: "[a]bsorption of surpluses through accelerations in turnover time" (183); through spatial displacementSee pp. 174-79 for the three charts showing the transition from 1) old to new capitalism, and 2) from organized to disorganized capitalism. 3) Fordism and flexible accumulationCompression of time and space--"I use the word 'compression' because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us" (240)."The central value system . . . is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessing causes and effects, meanings or values" (298). [e.g. the market place, culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema]"The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the smae space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal

almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production" (300)

Part III The experience of space and time I2. Introduction: different senses of time;the emphasis on time by social theory; on space by modern aesthetic theoryspatialization and representation p. 206 "Any system of representation, in fact, is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flow of experience and in so doing distorts what it strives to represent" (206).aestheticization of politics: Heidegger as an example

13. Individual spaces and times in social life--different spatial approaches to our social existence Hagerstrand pp. 211-12Foucault p. 213De Certeau pp. 213-14 -- (Harvey) "Spaces can be more easily 'liberated' than Foucault imagines, precisely because social practices spatialize rather than becoming localized within some repressive grid of social control" (214)"Symbolic orderings of time and space provide a framework for experience through which we learn who or what we are in society. 'The reason why submission to the collective rhythm is so rigorously demanded.' writes Bourdieu, 'is that the temporal forms or the spatial structures structure not only the group's representation of the world but the group itself, which orders itself in accordance with this representation.' . . . Modernization entails, after all, the perpetual disruption of temporal and spatial rhythms, and modernism takes as one of its missions the production of new meanings for space and time in a world of ephemerality and fragmentation." (215-16)Bachelard --poetic space 217

Lefebvre pp. 218-Here Harvey uses Bourdieu's habitus to explain the dialectical relationships of the three dimensions of space (of the lived, perceived and imagined). "The mediating link is provided by the concept of 'habitus' -- a durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations' which 'produces practices' which in turn tend to reproduce the objective conditions which produced the generative principle of habitus in the first place. The circular (or cumulative) causation is obvious.Harvey's grid of spatial practices p. 220-21

Gurvitch (1964) the meaning of time in social life "His primary thesis is that particular social formation . . . associate with a specific sense of time. Out of that study comes an eightfold classification of the types of social time that have existed historically.

14 Time and space as sources of social power - money, space and time as interlocking sources of social power. the paradox against all social movements: "For not only does the community of money, coupled with a rationalized space and time, define them in an oppositional sense, but the movements have to confront the question of value and its expression as well as the necessary organization of space and time appropriate to their own reproduction. In so doing, they necessarily open themselves to the dissolving power of money as well as the shifting definitions of space and time arrived at through the dynamics of capital circulation. Capital, in short, continues to dominate, and it does so in part through superior command over space and time, even when opposition movements gain control over a particular place for a time" (238-39). 15. The time and space of the Enlightenment project --history of mapping medieval -- emphasize the sensuous;Renaissance -- objective, practical and functionalEnlightenment --concerns for both the rational mapping of space and its rational division for purposes of administration

16 Time-space compression and the rise of modernism as a cultural force -- [the financial conditions of 1847-8 in Europe as an example of how financial crisis, which lead to the internationalism of money power, is related to crisis of representation in arts (e.g. Manet, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, etc.) ]

examples of the causes of time-space compression in modern times: transportation (railroad construction), photography, newspaper. "the telephone, wireless-telegraph, X-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, aireplane" (264-65)

e.g. Fordism -- accelerating the turnover time; and the first radio signal from Eiffel Tower--collapsing space into a simultaneity of an instant.

e.g. Art world and cultural constructions -- between internationalism and construction of place--> the use of ruins to construct the identity of place (272); aestheticization of local, regional and national politics. between spatial fragmentation and construction of a highly ordered and rationalized world. (e.g. Kandinsky 280)

17. Time-space compression and the postmodern condition accelerating turnover time in production, exchange and consumption--

"Speed-up was achieved in production by organizational shifts towards vertical disintegration--sub-contracting, outsourcing, etc.--that reversed the Fordist tendency towards vertical integration and produced an increasing roundaboutness in production

even in the face of increasing financial centralization. (Another example--'just-in-time' delivery') changes in consumption p. 285 -- e.g. 1) fashion; 2) services

* Consequences of the acceleration

1) volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, ....(285-2) the 'throwaway' society (286) --transience and sensory overload3) short-term planning --> schizophrenic mentality, addiction to work, etc. 4) manipulation of taste and opinion: "Advertising ...is increasingly geared to manipulating desires and tastes through images that may or may not have anything to do with the product to be sold." image culture 288; (e.g. brand image, personal image) "Given the pressures to accelerate turnover time (and to overcome spatial barriers), the commodification of images of the most ephemeral sort would seem to be a godsend from the standpoint of capital accumulation, particularly when other paths to relieve over-accumulation seems blocked. Ephemerality and instantaneious communicability over space then become virtues to be explored and appropriated by capitalists for their own purposes." the rapid increase of artists, and "transmitters" of culture novelists (e.g. Calvino) --have to deal with the accelerating turnover time and the rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values. (291)

* simulacra of memory -- home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.

Spacial collapse of boundaries -- e.g. TV images

Consequences: 1) destruction of the power of uninon; 2) new industrial ensembles (294); 3) the reaffirmation and realignment of hierarchy in global urban system;4) the emphasis on place and tradition 295 reaction against internationalism (time-space compression)place-bound identity

"In clinging, often of necessity, to a place-bound identity, however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon. 'Regional resistances,' the struggle for local autonomy, place-bound organization, may be excellent bases for political action, but they cannot bear the burden of radical historical change alone" (303). [another force: commodification of tradition] --Cf. 鹿港的「歷史之心」事件the search to construct place and its meanings qualitatively.

"Capitalist hegemony over space puts the aesthetics of place very much back on the agenda. . . The construction of such places, the fashioning of some localized aesthetic

image, allows the construction of some limited and limiting sense of identity in the midst of a collapse of imploding spatialities" (303). [Do we then give up constructing the local?]

Postmodern Time

http://mural.uv.es/alulla/defin.html4.55pm june25, Monday

Modernism has many definitions. In "Modernist Painting," Clement Greenberg finds the origin of modernism in the "immanent criticism" of Kant. Defining modernism as "the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself-not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence," he insists that "[m]odernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unravelling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation. .. Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our times than the idea of a rupture of continuity."l For Greenberg, Modernism is a diacritical practice that is inherently progressive: it builds on the past and moves forward into the future.

Like modernism, postmodernism has many definitions and is applied to diverse objects. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern condition as a collapse of narratives of legitimation, as "that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable," yet remains "undoubtedly part of the modern."2

Susan Suleiman gives a particularly useful definition. In the introduction to Subversive Intent she writes: "I interpret [postmodernism] as that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present -our present-takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition. How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past-a past that includes, in our very own century, some of the darkest moments in human history-without repeating it?"3

The very name we are giving to this curious condition is indicative of its conflicted relation to the past. If modernism is taken to represent a history that stretches behind us, then this new word, (formed by the attachment of a prefix that indicates anteriority) indicates both a separation from and a connection to that history. The relation between modernism and post- is necessarily complex and conflicted. If we are to think of postmodernism as a condition in which temporality becomes a problem, in which time ceases to progress in a predictable linear way and begins to behave in strange ways that are difficult to understand, then perhaps we must admit that postmodemism is both part of and radically different from modernism

This apparently paradoxical situation appears again and again as postmodem theory attempts to wrangle with given binarisms: subject/object, space/time, idea/material mind/body, nature/culture, essence/context (to name just a few). In each case, where there used to be a clear-cut distinction we find a collapse. Yet within the collapsed structure lies a field of differences. Like the first person in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, it is "an infinitely hot and dense dot."4

The historical practice of Michel Foucault exemplifies this complexity, in that it is implicated in modemist historiography as it undermines it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault identifies Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor for and effect of the distributions of power in eighteenth century France. "The Panopticon... must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men."5

But it is an historically discrete level of generality. Discipline and Punish isn't about the present, and it would be a mistake to employ the figure of the Panopticon to describe contemporary social space. Although contemporary life has many features in common with that historical period Foucault calls "classical," the strength of Foucault's re-reading of French history lies precisely in his refusal to fabricate trans-historical universals. In this sense, his understanding of history stands in critical opposition to modernist notions of history as a teleological progression toward a utopian future.

In order to better understand this distinction, let us look briefly at two antecedents to Foucault's historiography. In his lectures on Reason and History, GWF Hegel describes history as a dialectical movement toward the realization of the "Idea," the logical power of divinity, through "Reason," as "Spirit." "Reason is the law of the world and. . . therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally.... That this Idea or Reason be the True, the Eternal the Absolute Power and that it and nothing but it, its glory and majesty, manifests itself in the world... has been proved in philosophy."6

Hegel sees history as a worldly manifestation of philosophical absolutes. Human subjects are thus subjects of history to the extent that they manifest a "will to Spirit," and this "will to Spirit" is itself an historical inevitability. "The Spirit's development, i progression and ascent to an ever higher concept of itself.. is the result, on the one hand, of the inner development of the Idea and, on the other, of the activity of individuals, who are its agents and bring about its actualization."7

It is interesting to read Foucault in light of Hegel's transcendent notion of reason. Unlike Hegel, Foucault does not take the individual as a given. On the contrary, for Foucault, the individual is not an agent of the Idea but an "effect of power." In his published lecture of January 7, 1976, Foucault writes: "The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike... In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals."8

It would seem that power takes a similar [place] in Foucault'S theory that the idea takes in Hegel's. The operative terms (power and Idea) are both ubiquitous and pervasively causal. Power, for Foucault, produces knowledge, histories, subjectivity much as the Idea, for Hegel, is the driving force of philosophy, history and the individual.

The difference is not, as one might suspect, that Hegel's Idea is a positive force where Foucault's power is negative. On the contrary, for Foucault power is productive: "If power were never anything but repressive," Foucault asks, "do you think anyone would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."9

The crucial difference, if it could be reduced to a single opposition, would be that where Hegel starts with a universal abstraction that has been philosophically derived and proceeds to demonstrate its relation to concrete particularities, Foucault starts with the concrete and particular and proceeds toward abstraction. Where Hegel starts with Reason and finds it actualized in history, Foucault starts with specific institutions such as the prison and the clinic and derives from them descriptions of how power circulates in specific historical periods. Where Hegel's method descends from the general to the specific and the ideal to the material, Foucault conducts "an ascending analysis."10

This allows Foucault to destabilize the abstractions that are used to deduce and thus justify given institutions as historically inevitable. It opposes the descending logic of progress with an adductive critique of historical eventualities. Put simply, it allows us to see that history proceeds not out of necessity but out of contingency, that history is not necessarily as it should or must be but is, rather, the product of a complex and indeterminate set of negotiations.

It is here that Foucault's debt to Karl Marx becomes evident. "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven." 11

Marx rejects Hegel's idealism, and replaces it with an empirical materialism, an understanding of history as the sum of lived relations between and among classed subjects. Like Foucault after him, Marx begins his analysis of history with observation of concrete phenomena and institutions. "The premises from which we begin are... the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live... These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way."l2

It is this grounding in observation of the material world that situates Marx's political economy under the rubric of the Enlightenment, whose principal project is described by Horkheimer and Adorno as a replacement of religion by science as the principal means of explaining the world. "The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy... On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning."13

Scientific method emerged during the Enlightenment as a process of testing hypotheses through the execution of repeatable and verifiable experiments. Marxist analysis, then, is a scientific project in that its method shares with science a grounding faith in the utility and reliability of the empirical. But Foucault sees his project (here described as a genealogy) as a resistance to the effects of science on knowledge: "By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledge in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledge from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse."14

Marx aspires to science; Foucault seeks to resist it. So while Marx and Foucault share an historical methodology that works "from the ground up," their relation to science is distinct. A further distinction may be drawn between Foucault's emphasis on the micropolitical, "based on a reactivation of local knowledge" 15 and Marx's interest in politics on the macroscopic scale of class struggle.

And where Foucault focuses relentlessly on the past and present, Marx allows himself to imagine the future. His materialist critique of Hegel retains the promise of an eventual utopia in the classless society: "These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system."16 Marx seeks to emancipate history from Hegelian idealism through a materialist empiricism. Foucault attempts to emancipate histories from empiricism through a kind of critical myopia.

Foucault's relation to Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other is simultaneously one of similarity and difference. Foucault does not so much build on the work of his Germanic forebears as operate in their ruins. His project stands not in dialectical opposition to these modernist historiographies but in complicit contestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relation to modernism that qualifies Foucault's project as a postmodem one. Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it.

In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For Jameson, postmodern culture is a set of "specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism."l7

But it is also, in Jameson's view, the "cultural logic of late capitalism," an effect of a specific political-economic order. Postmodernism is thus "a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order-what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism." One is reminded here of Marx's

optical analogy: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical lifeprocess."18

Through this wonderful trope, ideology emerges as the topsy-turvy projection of material history, much as culture, in Jameson's analysis, is an effect of political economy. Though in Jameson's account the relation is, unfortunately, more straight-forward.

But if Jameson's analysis succumbs to a surplus of discretion in its description of the relations between postmodem culture and modernism on the one hand and late capitalism on the other, it manages an account of postmodern temporality that is more sophisticated. He describes this temporality in terms of schizophrenia.

Jameson's deployment of schizophrenia "is meant to be descriptive and not diagnostic."l9 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, schizophrenia is a failure on the part of the subject to accede into language. Schizophrenia is thus a "breakdown of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience of temporality. . . is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time. But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future."20

This account of postmodern temporality is strikingly similar to the one that Suleiman describes. And it resonates with the difference between a modernist historiography that presupposes progress and a postmodernist one that refuses to imagine a strong continuity between past, present and future.

An effect of this schizophrenic temporality is that "the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and 'material.'"21 If postmodernism is, as Jameson suggests, an effect of post-industrial capitalism, then Southern California is a quintessential example of postmodern social space, since the vast majority of its urban space has been constructed since World War II. This idea of postmodernism as an a historical condition helps to explain the rampant commodity fetishism and obsessive concern with surfaces, as well as the historical dislocation and lack of foresight that are manifested in typically Southern Californian phenomena such as auto detailing and cheap stucco strip malls, plastic surgery and "Los Angelization."

In a dossier on the exhibition Les Immateriaux, Lyotard relates this idea of postmodern time to the urban space of Southern California. ' When you drive from San Diego to Santa Barbara... you go through a zone of 'conurbation...' The opposition between a centre and a periphery disappears, as does the opposition between an inside (the city of men) and an outside (nature)... This is the kind of space-time... which has been chosen for 'the Immaterials.'"22 As spatial oppositions collapse into each other, so does the

opposition between space and time. What emerges is a schizo-space of glowing surfaces and accelerated movement.

A crucial feature of this emergence is the increasing mediation of new technologies. Technologies are not sets of material objects, but means through which objects and discourses are produced. I am thinking here particularly of technologies of electronic representation and communication such as television, telephony, computing and digital imaging. These technologies are both manifestations and producers of postmodernity. Lyotard writes: "Technology is not the cause of the decline of the modern figure; rather, it is one of its signs."23 Much as political-economy and cultural conditions produce each other in a symbiotic relation, technologies and the social field are engaged in a circular dynamic.

By increasing the speed of communications, new technologies participate in a collapse of spatial distances. As schizophrenia, the postmodern condition is both a problem of space-time and a crisis of subjectivity. The modern conception of the human subject as a willful agent and unique, individual author ceases to obtain. As Jameson writes, "the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity... which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world."24 It becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to maintain this (illusory) uniqueness if the face of a world that is hypersaturated with technologically mediated representations. postmodern subjectivity appears as a negotiation of programmed experiences, a reinscription of persistent simulations of an ever- more-remote "real."

Lyotard explains the collapse of the modem subject as an uncertainty in the relation between human agency and the world of objects, matter and mind. "In the tradition of modernity, the relationship between human beings and materials is fixed by the Cartesian program of mastering and possessing nature."25 As another implosion of binary oppositions into uncertainty, this collapse is a familiar trope of the postmoderm. Lyotard links the "death of the subject" directly to these new technologies: "Man's anxiety is that he is losing his (so called) identity as a 'human being.' One aspect of 'immaterials...' is that they imply just such a loss of identity... Most of these 'immaterials' are generated from computer end electronics technosciences..."26

In the so called "immaterial the distinction between medium and message cannot be maintained. The binary codes of computer software and electromagnetic waves of radio and television broadcasts are immaterializations of both signifier and signified at the same time. They stand as instances of the poststructural, non- binary sign. They frustrate a program of modern agency in which the subject exerts her or his will on the object in a transformative project of production. The immaterials resist objectification because they are always already in play. In his examination of French history, Foucault sees the Panopticon as a technology of power. "In Discipline and Punish what I wanted to show was how... there was a veritable technological take-off the productivity of power."27 As we seek to describe postmodernism as a productive effect of a specific historical moment then, we might look at the model of the net as a paradigm for the contemporary

distribution of power. The net describes a network of linked communications networks, a computerized fabric of information.

As more and more significant interactions take place on the net, it becomes increasingly important to situate it historically. I am suggesting that the net is to postmodern relations in the West what the Panopticon is to Classical" relations of power in France. In a discussion of contemporary power relations, Foucault himself writes: "power establishes a network through which it freely circulates."28 In the Panoptic regime, power is concentrated in a centre that exerts control over the periphery through an apparatus of visibility.

Those on the periphery internalize the controlling effects of the gaze, policing their own behaviours and desires. With the net, power is no longer centralized: it offers a structure without a centre and periphery. Like the "conurban" topography of Southern California, it consists of a dispersed array of nodes that are connected by a vascular system of arteries and capillaries of comnmunication. Power is not exerted and internalized through a visual economy; it is already diffused, and reproduces itself constantly and incessantly as each node interacts on the network in a multiplicitous economy of visual, textual and auditory signs . Information on the net is encoded, compressed and encrypted through the digital technology of binary code. All information on the net is always reduced to a stream of ones and zeros. In the Panopticon, both the macrostructure and the microstructure are binary. Center is paired and opposed to periphery; gaze is a relation of seer to seen. The net, on the other hand, has a non-binary macrostructure, but its microstructure is, ultimately, binary code itself. I take this as yet another example of the nets paradigmatic stature within postmodernism, since at the level of its basic structures, it is at once plural and binary, simultaneously one thing and the other.

The net is a space of instantaneous and interactive communication. In his discussion of an earlier phase in the development of communication technologies, Walter Benjamin describes the effects of the reduction of the distance between representations and the objects they refer to. "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction," he writes, "is the aura."29 In the postmodern age of electronic communication, the aura has collapsed entirely. Where the delay between the production and reception of visual and textual signs moved from slow to fast in the industrial age, the lag can now be measured only in nanoseconds. And where production and reception were once distinct and qualitatively removed from each other, they now merge into a complex textual practice. Reading becomes a form of writing, and vice versa. Messages float freely, disassociated from their producers. As a result, textual producers on the net can no longer be seen as authors in the modernist sense. With electronic mail, for example, messages are easily modified and forwarded, but the changes and the 'original' source or, more precisely, starting point, cannot be determined. The Barthesian move from work to text transpires in a burst of electromagnetic impulses.30 In "chat" spaces where real-time conversations take place through a textual interface, distinctions between speech and writing begin to dissolve. What emerges with the net is an environment that can be described more readily as a mode of intertexuality than in terms of embodied subjects in space.

The net enacts and is reproduced in the disembodiment of the human subject. Participants interact as discursive entities whose physiological properties cannot be deduced by the messages they send and receive. Identity is no longer determined by a body whose gender is fixed in a male/female logic of genital configuration. The performative qualities of identity are foregrounded to the extent that it can no longer be seen as a fixed and persistent set of qualities, and becomes eminently contingent and continually reproduced in specific discursive contexts.

The net, then, is a post-human environment where communities are established not by spatial proximity but through discursive affinities. In the net, post-human subjects group themselves and are grouped by shared interests and communication styles.

I have described postmodernism as an implosion of binary relations into a dense and uncertain field of shifting differences. This collapse is reproduced as a crisis of subjectivity and a problem of time. Much of the popular discussion of the new technologies of electronic communication is focused on the future. What impact will they have on our cultures and institutions? How will they change us? It seems that the idea of the future is once again encroaching on the the present. But this imagination of the future isn't tantamount to a recapitulation of modernist progress. It is almost as if the future has ceased to recede into posteriority, and has begun to arrive in the present. Does this nascent ability to imagine a future in the present tense indicate that we are emerging into a new paradigm whose name will not include in its body the word "modern?" It is impossible to know.

Time in Postmodernist Literature

Dr Amir Ali Nojoumian

Shahid Beheshti University

http://deirdar.blogfa.com/post-63.aspx7.15 pm, June 25, 2012

Abstract

This article is a study of the representation of time in postmodern narrative. It is divided into two major parts. Firstly, it examines the new definition of history in postmodernism and the effect of this new definition on postmodern narrative. History in postmodernism is no longer distinct from fiction. It is plural, and it does not provide total concepts, what Lyotard calls as 'meta-narratives'. History is entangled in a text as much as fictional discourse is. Sometimes a historical account in postmodernist literature becomes close to 'pastiche' which is a collection of images and simulations. Eventually, the notion of 'instantaneity' is discussed which breaks down the continuity of time i.e. the second part of this article, I have focused on the effect of phenomenology on the contemporary understanding and representation of time. Time in postmodern narrative is a phenomenon

existing on its own. It circles and fluctuates, but can not be patterned. It does not act as a line in order to make the plot coherent; it is coextensive with the events of the narrative. Finally, the notion of labyrinthine time is discussed. The whole article is an attempt to explore the role of time in postmodernist literature and this in itself will help towards a new understanding of literary texts.

***

The unfortunate image of a "road" to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion; we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. - Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

[L]ong novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time had been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

The representation of time was a prevalent strategy in modernist era as an effort to 'heroize' - as Michel Foucault states - and eternalize the present time. Subjective time in literary art can also be assumed as a reaction against public time which was and is a domineering force in human life. In postmodernism, time achieves a new role which suggests' a non-ending flow. Time is a phenomenon not an objective reality. It even acts as a character. The flux and isolation of different segments of time is accepted and exaggerated to the ultimate fragmentation of schizophrenia.

The representation of history

When history used to be considered as a linear purposeful process, human being could have relied on the passage of time in an objective way - time being shared by all human beings. Because of their disillusionment with the fast-moving progress of modernization, modernists turned their back on the historical atmosphere of the era and tried to heal the pain by looking into subjective time or timeless myths. But it seems that postmodernists have taken a braver step towards the representation of history. They try to portray the present time as the only conceivable thing.

History as a grand narrative was usually perceived as a total picture of our life. Postmodernism, by refusing to justify totality in general, replaced it with plurality. It strove to "wake from the nightmare of history." This shattered the notion of meta-narratives and in turn created a crisis in the periodization of history. The result is a new

way of representing history - 'textualized history' in which pastiche is a significant element.

Plurality vs. Totality

"We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one. ... Let us wage a war on totality" (Lyotard, 150). Lyotard, by declaring this, draws a line between modernist and postmodernist thinking. Modernism despite its discontinuous narrative always tried to achieve a total picture, a 'vision' of the world projected to human subject. Through its totalizing representational strategies, it tried to resolve the tension between its idealistic outlook with the notion of plurality which was an existent concept from the very outset of the century. But postmodernism is "cleansing fiction of all its remaining vestiges of Enlightenment ideology, of universals, totality and closure" (Mepham, 1470).

Postmodern narrative is skeptical towards any sort of coherent narrative. The unified visions of a modernist fiction like The Sound and the Fury, or To the Lighthouse can be compared with the disjunctive, fluctuated narrative of Luis Bunuel's film, The Phantom of Liberty (1974), in which every time the reader expects that a story is being conceived, the narrative structure shifts quite randomly to another story with different characters. Therefore, we are faced with various micro-stories which are not resolved at the end and give a true picture of the contemporary dislocation of time and space boundaries. The shattering of this vision of totality led to a 'total' negation of meta-narratives as evidence of totalizing discourses.

Meta-narratives

Meta-narratives, for Lyotard, are those historical periods that act as a touchstone for explaining the present. Mythology and religious discourse, for him, are the major sources of meta or grand narratives. Postmodernism is in constant fight with the established grand narratives because they do not accord with the instant values of postmodern period. One of the major problems with grand narratives, according to postmodernists, is that it presumes the past as the controlling and signifying force for the present time. Postmodernists instead try to define the past according to the present.

When the notion of totalizing meta-narratives is negated, the way history is periodized and represented enters into a crisis. We are left out of time and age whilst involved in a grid. We refuse the soothing effect of a universal human history. Meta-narratives are considered like a bed-time story to put us to sleep and dream.

Textualized History

Postmodernist literary art disillusioned by grand narratives of myth, universal history, and so on replaces the conventional history with its own - "textualized history" or" history as story and claims that there is no access to history except in textuality.

Textualized history is in fact the manifestation of the way the boundaries between history and fiction are shattered. Fictional history is justified because after all history as a discourse should be represented in a narrative form and while there is no narrative form in the process of contemporary history, fiction writers write their own histories.

Textualization in Borges's narrative is a significant postmodernist feature. For instance, he imagines a literary or historical text and then writes a synopsis or a review of it ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"). Another method of textualization is achieved when he imagines a geographical place and writes a research-like historical account of the place through textual criticism ("The Aleph" or "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius").

Pastiche

When there is a loss of historical continuity, the past is represented by a collection of images which are supposed to put the effect of the past into the present. Pastiche is a technique which simulates and represents old time and space in the present through images and simulacra, hence a simulated time or space. John Mepham points to a very important distinction between modernism and postmodernism and distinguishes postmodernist pastiche from the modernist abstract forms of representation: "Postmodernism is an ironic rethinking of the past. In our time, postmodernist fiction is not the anti-mimetic experimentalism of the obscurantists, but the pleasurably ironic return to fictional forms of coherent story telling" (Mepham, 153).

But pastiche can also take a nostalgic rather than an ironical tone. America itself is an example of pastiche. Having no authentic past, America as a "giant screen" - as Baudrillard coins the phrase - tries to make all periods available at once. If we take the process of simulation in Disneyland into account, we may understand how it is correctly and not ironically labeled as "the symbolic American utopia."

The way E. L. Doctorow deploys pastiche in his fiction is not ironical either. America is the setting of most of his fictions which deal with a historical period. For instance, Ragtime is a postmodern novel which portrays the first decades of the century in America. Doctorow by making a collage of different dominant images of the time such as Harry Houdini, Ford, Morgan, Zapata, ragtime music, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Freud and so on innovates a new narrative for a historical period. In the case of Doctorow, pastiche should not be considered "an ironical rethinking of the past." Doctorow, due to his interest in the old left movement in America looks at the first half of the century in a nostalgic tone rather than an ironic one.

Instantaneity

Instantaneity and depthlessness are two parallel characteristics of postmodern narrative as the outcomes of dislocated time and space. People, through instant material satisfactions, like instant foods, instant services and so on, live in perpetual instantaneity. Harvey explains the roots of this characteristic when he writes: The collapse of time horizons and the preoccupation with instantaneity have in part arisen through the contemporary emphasis in cultural production on events, spectacles, happenings, and media images" (Harvey, 59). These segments of time correspond to the idea of instantaneous in post modern narrative.

The presentness of modernism and the presentness of postmodernism are in no way similar. Modernists heroize and eternalize the present while postmodernists consider it as the only conceivable event. For instance, Doctorow's attack on 'succession' in The Book of Daniel is essentially modernist when he wants to stop its succession: "What is most monstrous is sequence. . . . If the flower is beautiful why does my baby son not look at it forever" (Doctorow, 262)?

Another cause for instantaneity is information technology. The process of information technology aggravates the impact of instantaneity. We have instant access to information in 'no time.' It neutralizes the way we used to 'remember.' Memory used to be associated with time but now it is juxtaposed with instantaneity. The outcome of this condition is "the temporary contract in everything." Ephemerality "becomes the hallmark of postmodern living" (Harvey, 291).

Phenomenological Time

We must not say time flows in consciousness - it is, on the contrary, consciousness which, on the basis of its now, deploys or constitutes time. We could therefore say that consciousness now intentionalizes what it is conscious of, in the mode of no longer, or the mode of not yet, or finally in the mode of presence.

- Jean-Francois Lyotard, Phenomenology

Time in postmodern narrative is a phenomenon existing on its own. It circles and fluctuates, but can not be patterned. It does not act as a line in order to make the plot coherent; it is coextensive with the events of the narrative.

Modernist narrative is specifically concentrated on an omniscient point of view of the stream of consciousness of characters, hence 'zooming' on the 'inside' while the 'outside'

is always felt. But in postmodernism, there is no 'outside.' The writer and the reader are engaged 'inside' the flow of temporality of the text without making any closing comment on the whole process of time. Form is transformed into experience. Therefore, the flow of temporality in postmodernism becomes completely different from the modernist stream of consciousness.

In addition, this notion of time is in no way synonymous with the linear time which dominated the pre-modernist literature, either. It is a flowing existence which is devoid of any beginning, end, or centre. Postmodernism is indeed against the Aristotelian perception of time with a pre-known telos and authentic whole. The referential totality of time is ignored and fixed reference points and boundaries are shattered. It accepts the 'dread' which boundless non-foundational temporality causes and negates a tranquillizing 'whole' or 'picture'. Quite appropriately, as Thomas Docherty states, while the modernist text is considered as a 'noun', the postmodernist text is a 'verb, whose temporality, or in other words context-boundedness, is its very 'identity' (Connor, 123). Time in brief is in disclosure rather than a spatial form (as modernists believed).

This, in turn, limits the process of interpretation. A modernist text which is essentially temporal is bounded and sealed off in a centred circular space. Therefore, the process of interpretation is limited to 'the ultimate meaning' whole - of the text. The reader of a modernist text while feeling free to delve into the mind of the characters is in fact in an inclusive circle and should reach 'the place' the author wants him/her to.

The reader's hermeneutic process in postmodern narrative is an experience as the narrative itself reflects an experience. It is not simply an urge to achieve a mastery over an enclosed text. The hermeneutic process in an 'ideal' text is achieved when it is listened to. The postmodern text is moving toward non-printed forms. For instance, hypertext in computer science creates parallel texts which can be read at the same time. The reader is involved in a labyrinth of texts which can be arranged in almost endless ways. Consequently, the postmodern text becomes an open-ended text in which the hermeneutic process is never completed and each hermeneutic experience is considered as one of the infinite number of possibilities.

Moreover, the phenomenological reader becomes an interested participant. It should be emphasized that this concept of readership is beyond WolfgangIser's reader-response theory. The reader is not supposed to fill the gaps to reach the 'ultimate' text. In fact, both the reader and the writer are experimenting with different collages of the fragments of the text to experience new dimensions of art. In other words, the reader writes the text while reading it.

Temporal Maze

The metaphor of the labyrinth illustrates the existential notion of time effectively. The phenomenological attitude perceives time as created at any instance. There is no

beginning or end to it. At the same time, it is not circular in its closing implication. It is an infinite 'line' but not successive. We are always in the middle of this time. Time is a labyrinth of mirror-walls in which each moment of time like a single signifier suspends playfully.

This image of the temporal maze is effectively adopted by postmodernist fiction writers. The repetition of scenes in Robbe-Grillet's novels, for instance, creates this labyrinthine time. On another level, metafiction in which a text is inside another text, in which each text has its own pace of time, creates a labyrinth. The multiple beginnings and endings of Andre Brink's States of Emergency and the three alternative endings of E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel demonstrate the alternative interior entrances and paths and exits of a labyrinth in time too. In labyrinthine time, the present instant of time is the only conceivable existence. This present time is not eternalized and does not contain past or future.

Final Word

Postmodernism as an artistic and theoretical movement: provokes pluralism, remains always at the threshold of meaning, postpones final purpose, considers absence as a signifying force, reconciles contradictions in the form of paradoxes, plays with the signifiers, reflects the contemporary addiction to signs and simulations, rejects any art form, is only interested in the journey rather than the destination, pays more attention to the copy or translation than the original, considers any act of reading as misreading, places the reader in the writer's position, makes us used to live happily in uncertainty and indeterminacy, and finally negates any totalitarian fixed universal absolute strategy in art and thinking.

Bibliography:

Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, ed. Donald A Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Doctorow, E. L., The Book of Daniel Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981. Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime. London: Macmillan, 1976.

David, The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, Harvey, 1989. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in Modernism / Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London and New York: Longman, 1992. pp. 139-150.

Mepham, John, "Narratives of Postmodernism", in Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, ed. Edmund J. Smyth. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd,1991. pp. 138-155.

Nojoumian, Amir Ali, "Labyrinthine Spaces in Postmodern Narrative, "Manuscript 2:1. Summer 1997. pp. 39-47.